How To Attach an Email to an Email in Gmail

Some Gmail users might occasionally need to show a few of their emails to other people. There are a few ways that you can attach emails to Gmail emails. You can forward messages or attach an email file saved to your cloud storage or hard drive.

Here are some tips for attaching emails to Gmail emails.

Forward an Email

If you only need to share one email in your inbox, forwarding it might be the best option. Gmail’s Forward option enables you to add a selected email to the bottom of a new message. You can forward Gmail emails in your inbox or those that you’ve sent.

Open an email to forward in Gmail. Click the ‘Forward’ option at the bottom of the email.

Input an email address to send the forwarded email to, enter some text above the forwarded email and press the Send button.

To forward multiple emails at once, check out this Tech Junkie article.

Copy and Paste Emails

Alternatively, you could just copy and paste other emails into one email to attach them without any files. You can do that by selecting the text in one email with the cursor and pressing the Ctrl + C (Cmd+C on a Mac) keyboard shortcut. Click Compose and press the Ctrl + V (Cmd+V on a Mac) hotkey to paste the copied message into the text editor.

Attach an Email PDF to a Gmail Email

However, forwarding or copying and pasting messages might not be ideal if you need to send lots of emails in your inbox. Instead, you can send multiple emails in your inbox to another recipient by attaching actual email files to Gmail messages. To do that, you need to save emails as PDF files; but Gmail doesn’t include any obvious option to download messages as PDFs.

A Google Drive account is ideal for sending PDFs through Gmail, which you can set up on this page. Then you can save Gmail emails to Google Drive as PDFs. But, you can also save the email to your local machine too. Keep in mind, we’re using a Mac for this, but your Windows PC will only vary slightly.

Attach an Email Using A Mac or PC

First, open the email to save to Google Drive in Gmail. Click on the printer icon in the upper right-hand corner.

That will open the print preview window shown directly below. Click on ‘More Settings.’

Next, you’ll need to scroll down a bit and click on ‘Open PDF in Preview.’ If you’re using a Windows computer to perform this task you’ll likely see another destination for your PDF. But don’t worry, you can still save the PDF to your system and send it using Gmail.

A new window will open with your email. Now, you click the share icon (on both Mac and Windows) to email the message or you can save it. If you opt to email the message you will do so from your system’s default email client.

If you choose to save the email to your system (File>Save>Choose location) you can attach the PDF like any other file using Gmail on the website or the app. This method works for both PC and Mac users.

Now, open Gmail and click ‘Compose.’

Next, attach your file by clicking the paperclip icon at the bottom, going to the location of your saved email, and clicking ‘Send.’ Of course, you’ll also need to populate the recipient, add a subject, and add any text you may need.

Attach a PDF Using Google Drive

As mentioned earlier, attaching an email using Google Drive is pretty simple. This is a two-step process, but we promise it is really simple.

Save Your Email to Google Drive

The easiest way to save a Gmail to your Google Drive is with this Chrome Extension. Install the extension and sign in to your Gmail account.

Open the email you’d like to send and click on the puzzle piece icon in the upper right-hand corner. Then, click on the Google Drive Extension. This will automatically save your email to your Google Drive.

Send Your Email From Google Drive

Press the Compose button in Gmail to open the New Message text editor. Click the Insert files using the Drive button to open the window shown directly below. Select a Gmail email PDF to attach from there, and press the Insert button.

You should see the Gmail PDF attached to the top of the new email as shown directly below. Click that attachment to open a PDF preview of it in Google Chrome. You can remove the attachments by clicking their X icons.

Attaching Emails Using the Gmail Mobile App

Of course, it’s certainly easier to simply forward an email from the mobile app, but if you want to use the PDF to email method described above, it’s very simple too.

Open the email you’d like to save then send and click on the three vertical dots in the email body.

Next, click ‘Print.’

At the top, select the dropdown arrow next to destination. Select the PDF option, then select the location you’d like to save the file to.

Finally, create a new email and populate the necessary fields. Then click on the paperclip icon to attach your file. Choose the location where you saved it, click on the file, then click ‘Send.’

Back up Gmail Emails with the Save Emails and Attachments Add-on

Save Emails and Attachments is a Google Sheets add-on that automatically saves your Gmail emails as PDFs. As such, this add-on will come in handy for attaching emails to Gmail messages. Instead of manually saving them as PDFs, you can configure the add-on to automatically back up the emails.

First, add Save Emails and Attachments to Google Sheets by pressing the + Free button on this website page. Open Sheets, click Add-ons > Save Emails and Attachments and select Create rule. It will request that you switch to a Save Emails sheet, so press the Open Spreadsheet button to open the sheet below.

Click Add-ons > Save Emails and Attachments > Create New Rule to open the window directly below. There you can enter a range of conditions for the saved emails to match. For example, filling out the Received after and before boxes will save emails received between those dates to Google Drive.

You can automatically save all your Gmail emails to Google Drive by entering the present date in the Received before box. Press the Select Drive Folder button. Choose a folder to save them to, click Select and press the Save button. Having automatically saved all your Gmail emails with the add-on, you don’t need to manually save them as PDFs before attaching to new messages.

So that’s how you can attach emails to other Gmail messages by selecting the Forward option or by saving them as PDFs. This Tech Junkie guide also provides further details about how you can save Gmail emails as PDF documents.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I send multiple emails in one email?

You can, but to do this you’ll first need to save them all as PDFs as explained above. This is a great solution if you need to forward several emails to one person. Simply save them as PDFs (be sure they’re saved to the same location to avoid confusion later on) and attach them all to one email.

Can I drag and drop Gmails?

Unfortunately, no. As of February 2021, this did not work on any of the devices that we’ve tried. Of course, it would be a very interesting solution so if you’ve managed to drag and drop one email into another we’d love to know how in the comments below!